Introduction to editing

Introduction to Editing

Hey everyone, and welcome to week 3 of this course. I hope you had fun filming your video, and you’re excited to jump into the edit. It’s probably my favourite bit of the process, at my core, I’m an editor really.. soooo lets jump in!

The edit - this is where it all comes together. It's commonly said, but its importance should not be underestimated. Editing is where you can bring your vision to life and make it impactful - it’s really where you craft together your story. It is the make or break of your video, and it matters A LOT.

It allows you to shape your raw footage into a polished and cohesive story that engages your audience. Good editing can turn an average video into a great one, and bad editing can ruin even the best footage. You can change certain messages and how people and situations look. You can dramatise it with low suspenseful music or add comedic value with pauses in the music or text onscreen. You can also use effects to add visual interest and creative flair to your videos.. colour grading, transitions, and animation, stuff like that. The possibilities are endless, and it's up to you to experiment and find your own unique style.

For my sub 60 second short form videos, I tend to film wayyy more than I need. Even with a fast paced edit, footage seems to go quite a long way. So I cut out quite a lot.

With my YouTube 5 minute plus videos, I don’t have that 60 second limit, and usually everything is mostly scripted, so I tend to use a lot more of the footage that was shot, mainly so that the story makes sense with how it was written.

You might not work like that, but that’s really up to you to try stuff, practice, and figure that out.

In the edit, learning and knowing what you need to cut and what you should keep, will drastically improve the video - and it’s weird because it’s something the viewer doesn’t see or even know about.

The edit is about telling this story the best way you can with what you have to use. And that includes scrapping sections if it doesn’t add anything to the video - be brave, and be brutal!

In this module, we’re going to cover the following:

• A very commonly asked question is, “What software do I use?” and why that question doesn’t really matter.
• How I’ve always structured my files
• The importance of music and Where you can get your music from
• How to properly ‘index’ your music so you can edit with it easily
• Show you how I build what I call, a “block edit”
• And finally, I show you my full process in to how I edit my videos.

So, let's jump into it with the first lesson “What software do I use?”, which by the way, I’m going to film next door. The studio next door is where I edit, so it just feels right to do the editing stuff in there..